Linda notwithstanding, I love my job. Even the tedium of doing the same breads every week is okay for now. Till I find the rhythm again. Till I can look at a bowl of flour and know how many cups or grams there are. Till I can grab a fistful of dough and say with certainty that it’s too wet or not wet enough.
I love getting off work at seven in the morning, walking home as the city’s just starting to hum and cats are slinking under porches. I love knowing that most of the people I pass are lock-stepping to their daily obligation and I’m done. The day belongs to me.
Taking Linda’s advice, I start going to bed right after breakfast. With a down comforter to keep me warm, my futon opened up in front of the woodstove, and blackout shades on the windows, I’m having my best sleep in years.
If it’s not raining when I wake up, I walk the neighborhood. I begin to recognize neighbors at work in their yards, mothers with their baby strollers, kids with their dogs. We smile, say hi or nice day or think we’ll get some rain tonight? I discover a tiny park at the top of the hill on Eighth Place and Highland, with a bench that has a 180-degree view of the Sound and the Olympic Mountains.
Sometimes I read; sometimes I just sit there, lost in the way the sun glints off the water like handfuls of diamonds. I watch the Washington state ferries chug to and from Bainbridge Island through swarms of bright spinnakers. When the sun falls into that slot behind the mountains, the wind picks up and the temperature drops, but it’s worth the cold walk home to see the Olympics catch fire in the sunset or a huge white bank of fog unroll off the water.
Sometimes I manage to forget the reason I’m here. That I’m waiting for David to figure out what he wants. Whether the package includes me. I sit on my bench and have heartfelt imaginary conversations with him. He tells me he loves me, that it’s been a terrible mistake, he can’t live without me, he’s told Kelley it’s over. I smile sadly and murmur that I’m just not sure if it can ever be the same with us.
His voice cracks as he says, “Believe me, Wyn, I understand, but if you let me make it up to you, I swear you’ll never be sorry.”
Laundry has never been an issue for me in the great cosmic scheme of things. For the last seven years, Hildy, our housekeeper, took care of it along with almost everything else. Sheets, towels, clothes magically appeared in drawers, in closets—washed and ironed, folded or hung up. The closest I got to the process was buying more detergent whenever she said we needed it.
Now it’s a logistical thing. I have no washer, no dryer. So when I run out of things to wear, I stuff all my dirty clothes in a pillowcase and drag them down to the Queen Anne Launderland on Queen, across from the A & J Meat Market.
It’s a colossal waste of time. You have to sit there while your clothes go through the whole fill, wash, spin, fill, rinse, spin. Then you have to wait while the industrial-strength dryer makes pommes frites out of your Calvin Klein briefs. Yes, you can read. But if you get engrossed in a book and you don’t jump up and get your clothes the second the machine stops, you run the risk of some grimy-fingered guy waving your black push-up bra overhead and yelling, “Whose 38B?”
Okay, this might sound just a bit too fastidious, but I worry about germs. I have no idea what these people do in their clothes. They could be out rolling around in nonbiodegradable toxic wastes for all I know. And then I have to put my stuff in the same machine?
After two forays into this alien culture, I finally figure out that the best time to go is early in the morning. I take my pillowcase/laundry bag to work with me and hit Launderland on my way home. Seven-thirty is too early for anyone else to be there except for one or two retired couples drinking their early bird half-priced coffee and clipping coupons, and some guy in a baseball cap who never even looks up from the notebook he’s scribbling in. Plus, at that hour you have at least the illusion that the place is clean.
The bakery officially closes at two, but Diane and Ellen are usually there with Jen and Misha, the day crew, till five or six, doing special orders, wholesale stuff, and prep work. I drop in one or two afternoons a week to hang out for a couple of hours.
I watch Diane put the finishing touches on cakes to be picked up early in the morning, and I help her wrap freshly baked layers for the freezer. Ellen plows through paperwork, makes entries in the ledger book that she keeps in her desk. Her actual baking time is limited, but she supervises the afternoon crew making cinnamon rolls, muffins, cookies, and Mazurka Bars, arguably the bakery’s most famous product.
Ellen invented Mazurka Bars—at least her version of them—when she lived in New Hampshire, and she brought the recipe out west with her, just like the pioneer women. Except she came in the seventies, driving her derelict Volkswagen Beetle instead of a covered wagon.
I never heard of them till I started working here, but I soon discovered how wonderful they are—a bar cookie with a thin, flaky crust on the bottom, then the lemon or chocolate/espresso or apple/raisin or raspberry filling, and over that the crumble layer that other bakers would kill for. It has a habit-forming, sandy crunch. It’s not too sweet and it doesn’t disintegrate all over your clothes when you take a bite.
While the recipe for Mazurka Bars is as closely held as the formula for Coca-Cola, Ellen’s not at all averse to telling me their history.
“I was messing with one of my mother’s old recipes,” she says. “I wanted some individual desserts I could take to a picnic, but at first they were so crumbly. And the only filling she ever used was lemon. How boring is that?”
Without waiting for an answer, she rambles on, absently stacking bills in alternating vertical and horizontal rows. She tells me about the first months she lived in Seattle, when the only job she could find was waitressing at the Five Spot.
“It was okay, you know. I wasn’t making a killing, but they were nice people to work for, and the regulars were fun. Of course, they wouldn’t let me cook, and I was dying to. So I just started baking Mazurkas in my apartment and wrapping them in plastic wrap and hauling them downtown on the bus.
“I’d hang around outside movies and down at Seattle Center when there was a Sonics game—”
“Always one step ahead of the health department,” Diane pipes up.
Ellen laughs. “They never knew where the Mazurka Bar lady was going to surface next.”
My oma used to say it’s amazing what you can hear when you’re not talking, and I learn all manner of interesting tidbits in those idle afternoons, in addition to the history of Mazurka Bars. Like the secret to a well-risen cake is to cream the butter and sugar forever, so a lot of air is incorporated. Diane usually walks away and does other things while the Hobart beats the bejeezus out of the stuff.
She wraps strips of wet towels around the cake pans to make the cake rise evenly, eliminating that dome in the center. I discover that spritzing hazelnuts with water before you toast them steams the skins and they slip right off without a fight. That all the small products—muffins, scones, even cookies—can be frozen unbaked and then baked without thawing. I watch Jen cut perfect slices of cheesecake with dental floss and Misha use a thin-bladed knife to surgically remove the charred crust from an overdone cake.
But maybe the most important thing I learn is that almost any disaster, no matter how awful it looks, can be salvaged if you keep your head and don’t just start dumping things into the garbage.
Payday is every Friday. Since I’m not completely confident of the reliability of David’s monthly deposits, I’ve gotten into the habit of picking up my paycheck on Friday afternoons and taking it over to the Washington Mutual branch on Queen Anne Avenue. When I unlock the back door one misty November afternoon, the work area is dark and empty, but I hear water running. Out front Tyler bends over the sink, shirtless, pouring blue liquid on her head. The fact that she’s easily seen through the front windows either hasn’t occurred to her or doesn’t disturb her.
“Hi, Wyn.” She squints at me upside down, then answers my unspoken question. “Ellen lets me do my hair here because my dad won’t let me do it at home.”
I look around at the puddles of blue liquid everywhere. “Does that stain?”
“Sort of. It comes out eventually.” “Ellen’s not worried about contamination?”
She giggles. “It wouldn’t hurt if it got in anything. It’s just Kool-Aid.” She points to a crumpled packet on the counter.
“One little package makes your hair look like that?”
“Well, I had to strip the color out first. Twice, ‘cause my hair’s, like, really dark.” She straightens up, pressing her head with a blue-stained towel. “So what are you doing here?”
“I just came to pick up my check.”
“How’re you getting along with that paragon of personality, the lovely Linda LaGardia?” She’s doing her strung-out disc jockey voice.
“Let’s just say we’re getting used to each other.” I perch on the edge of a tall stool next to the counter and watch her fluffing her hair with the towel.
She pulls on a black T-shirt, picks up the crumpled Kool-Aid packet, aims, and fires a perfect hook shot into the trash. Then, oblivious to my stare, she executes a perfect back jump and falls into the splits. “You were a cheerleader?”
“In a former life.” She grins. “I got tossed from the squad when I dyed my hair blue.”
One of the tables is covered with paper. Watercolors. Scenes of Seattle in the rain. A dish of water, a box of paints, and some brushes sit on a half-sheet pan on the counter.
“Are these pictures yours?”
“Midterm projects,” she says. “They’re all due Monday.” “They’re beautiful.”
She grimaces. “ ‘Too derivative.’ That’s what the teacher said last time. Like I give a shit.”
“They remind me of the Impressionist pictures of Paris in the rain.” I’m determined to give her a compliment, whether she wants it or not.
Her look is gently reproving. “That’s what they’re supposed to remind you of. That’s why they’re too derivative.”
I laugh. “I still think they’re beautiful. Do you like doing watercolors?”
She shrugs.
“Why are you taking the classes?”
“Gotta do something. I’m too dumb for college.”
“You’re not dumb. You’re just nonlinear.”
She laughs, flinging her blue-fringed head forward, then back. “ ‘Nonlinear.’ Cool. I like it.”
I look around at all the art on the walls. “Is any of this yours?”
“Nah. Ellen said she’d hang something of mine, but I haven’t got anything I like that much. I did the menu board, though.”
“It’s classy. I love illuminated capitals.”
She looks at me with marginal interest. “How come you know about art? Like the Impressionists and illuminated capitals.”
“I know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a lot about anything.”
She nods sagely, disappears into the bathroom. A few seconds later, I hear the whine of a hair dryer. I study the watercolors, imagining how one might look in a frame on the wall of my living room.
Tyler emerges from the bathroom sporting a halo of blue fuzz that makes her look like a toy Easter chick.
“Done?” I ask.
“Almost. Gotta do the spikes.” She opens the door of the Traulsen. “You need an egg yolk?”
“Not really.”
“I use the whites for my spikes, but I don’t need the yolks. I think you can do facials with them.”
“It’s the whites you do facials with,” I tell her.
She frowns, grabs one egg from a flat and deftly separates it, stashing the yolk in an espresso cup. She beats the white with a few drops of water and heads for the bathroom again. “I’m going to the U2 concert tonight.”
“Have fun.”
I tuck my check into the inside pocket of my coat and let myself out. For one minute, I wish I was going to the U2 concert, never mind that I don’t even like them. I think of CM and me at Tyler’s age, running wild in the Valley with a pack of girlfriends. Going to the Sepulveda Drive-In Movie (a.k.a. the Finger Bowl) in my ancient black Chevy with red baby-moon hubcaps and no backseat. Hamburger Hamlet and Jake’s Pizza and Topanga Plaza.
The bank guard locks the glass door behind me. It’s four o’clock, and mist halos the streetlights in the early darkness. Queen Anne Avenue is teetering on the edge of Gentrification Gulch without falling over. Yet. Trendier places like Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs, Sonora Southwestern Gourmet, Avant Card, and the new bookstore are popping up seemingly overnight, like mushrooms on the forest floor.
But the old-timers still dominate the street—Arch Plumbing Supply with its windows full of tools and parts predating Liquid-Plumr. Fancy Fabrics, where you can barely squeeze between tables piled with bolts of chintz and dotted swiss and worsted wools. The seedy-looking Greek restaurant that Ellen swears has the best hash browns in Seattle. Another bakery, featuring the kind of Danish my oma loved and cakes with that Crisco/sugar icing that crunches between your teeth. A consignment shop called Rags to Riches, a state liquor store, Thriftway, and a couple of bars.
One of the bars is Bailey’s. I’ve passed by it plenty of times. It looks like a typical neighborhood pub, low-key, nonthreatening. The kind of place where a single woman could go and have a glass of wine and read. Or write a letter. Or just mope if she felt like it, without being pestered. I’m not used to going out alone, particularly not to bars. But the mist has turned to rain now, and walking in it isn’t quite as much fun. I hesitate for a minute with my hand on the door.
No. Not yet.
Without noticing exactly how or when it happens, Linda and I settle into an uneasy accommodation. She quits making snide remarks about my name, age, and work history; I quit trying to make our relationship personal and pushing new ideas on her.
I think she’s even started to like having me around. Well, maybe not me personally, but someone. She wears wrist braces for her tendonitis. Industrial-strength support hose peek out below her too short slacks. She complains about pain in her right shoulder, probably arthritis. She has to be glad that I’m strong enough to lift the sheet pans, heavy with wet dough, to drag fifty-pound sacks of flour, to do most of the loading and unloading of the oven decks. Of course, she’d eat ground glass before she’d admit it, even to herself.
I tell her about Jean-Marc. How he saw me rubbing my neck one day and told me, “A little pain is good, Wynter. It is how the trade enters your body.” She gets a big hoo-ha out of that one.
My antennae start picking up snippets of information about her. There’s a husband. Then I discover he’s an ex-husband. She calls him Bubba. Ellen tells me his name is Walter and that he’s still lurking in a corner of the picture.
Tyler mentions that he used to be a captain on the ferries. “Pulled down some pretty good bucks, but he got busted down to seaman for drinking on the job. I think that’s when she kicked his ass out. They have two kids, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Ellen frowns. “You know how I feel about gossip.” Tyler and I look at each other and try not to laugh.
Just before Thanksgiving, the weather goes from bleak to abysmal—gray, wet, bone-chilling—every day for a week. Ellen laughs at my whining. “Honey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait till February when it’s been raining nonstop for two months.”
One evening, in an attempt to regain my rapidly loosening grip on sanity, I call my mother. The machine answers and her voice tells me that “the Morrisons” are unavailable at the moment, but that “one of us” will be glad to call back as soon as possible. It’s nine-fifteen, no, almost nine-thirty. Where is she? I don’t leave a message. Just as I settle the receiver back in its cradle, it rings and I jump.
“So you haven’t drowned.”
“CM! Are you home?”
“Yes, thank you, Jesus.”
“How did it go?”
“Great. We got lots of good video, but I’m beat.”
“Are you going to L.A. for Thanksgiving?”
“I’m not going anywhere near an airport for a long time. What are you doing?”
“The bakery’s closed for the whole weekend.”
“Come over here and we can make turkey on Thursday?”
I call her on Tuesday to see what she wants me to bring. She still sounds tired, but she says she’s taking the rest of the week off and she’s positive she’ll be fine by Thanksgiving Day. She calls me Wednesday night, and I know as soon as I hear her voice that she’s not fine.
“I hate to wimp out on you,” she says, “but I’ve got some kind of bug.”
“Oh, damn.” I stare at the blackness outside my window, listen to the rain pelting the glass. “What can I do? You need anything from the drugstore? Groceries?”
“I’m set. The doctor sent out some antibiotics. I’ve got chicken soup in the fridge. Not that I can eat anything. I’m planning to sleep for the next forty-eight hours.”
“Don’t forget to take your medicine. Call me if you need anything. I’ll be here all weekend.”
About noon on Thanksgiving Day, I get up and open the blackout shades, climb back into my warm burrow. Fog, so thick you could squeeze it between your fingers, hangs outside the windows. I stare at the textured ceiling. It’s not bad, my little house. Plenty of people would consider it the apex of luxury. I’ve decided the barrenness is oddly restful, like camping in the high desert.
Okay, the place is depressing. Cold, stark, and empty. I’m sick of the color—polar-bear-in-a-snowstorm white. My eyes sweep the blank walls; nothing to stop or direct my glance. Out of nowhere, a bossy voice in my brain says, So, paint.
Silly. You can’t paint a rental.
Of course you can. You can always paint it white again when you leave.
I sit up, and the comforter falls from my shoulders. My stomach flutters with an unlikely excitement. Everything’s closed today, but I could get the paint tomorrow morning. There’s just the two rooms. How long can it take? Suddenly I’m pulling on my sweats, my socks and shoes, sweater and jacket. An hour later I’ve returned from the convenience store with an armload of decorating magazines to peruse while I’m eating my oatmeal.
I flip the pages, barely focusing on the articles, simply letting the pictures bombard me with color. Here’s my problem. I’ve been suffering from acute color deprivation. I gulp it greedily. The food colors—dark chocolate, pale salmon, tart grape, and spicy cinnamon. Flower hues—lavender, fern, jonquil, heliotrope. The earth shades—clay and teal, pewter, mahogany. By my second cup of coffee, I’ve decided on terra-cotta for the back room and bath, yellow for the main room. A warm, sunny yellow, like my little bedroom on the third floor of the Guillaumes’ house in Toulouse.
My French immersion experience was just that—immersion. It was more than being in another city, another country, a different culture. It was like being a freshwater fish suddenly deposited in the Pacific Ocean—wildly disorienting. At first I floundered, exhausted by the sheer effort required for something as simple as asking directions and processing the response.
It wasn’t quite the same as French class where the important topics of conversation included the weather—It fait beau aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas? Or the deviant behavior of various small animals—Le chat est sur le lit et le chien est sous la table. Everyone spoke rapidly, especially my peer group, and of course they never teach you slang in class. After my one attempt to just let it rip, when I called someone a connard (approximate translation, “shithead”) instead of the more harmless canard (duck), I decided to stick with textbook French, even if it did sound rather stilted.
Sylvie’s friends were all very nice to me, but I felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Not one of them was over five-five, all thin and sylphlike in spite of the fact that they ate like stevedores. Most were pretty, but even those who weren’t managed to be attractive simply by being French. They could wear jeans and a T-shirt and then just throw on a scarf or some leather high-heeled boots or a buttery-soft suede jacket or a trendy hat and look like something out of Vogue. And they knew how to do things. How to smoke or sit, how to walk across a room or a street, how to order an aperitif, while no one my age back home even knew what an aperitif was.
Dinner chez Guillaume was a thing I anticipated every day with dread. In addition to making polite conversation, and watching Sylvie to see what each spoon or fork was for, I tried desperately to figure out what I was eating before I took an irrevocable amount into my mouth.
Not until I’d been beaten down, like at boot camp, and accepted the fact that everything, including the air that I breathed, was totally alien, did I begin to relax. It happened suddenly, only two weeks into my stay. One night at dinner, I slumped in my chair, too dazed with fatigue to talk, to care if I was using the fish knife correctly, to wonder exactly what I was swallowing, and all at once the realization stole over me. I was getting at least the general drift of the conversation without even thinking about it. Probably because I wasn’t thinking about it. Suddenly I sat taller in my chair. My eyes focused on Jean-Marc, over whose head I’d been staring, spaced out, and he gave me what for him was a pretty big grin.
“Bienvenue, Wynter,” he said.
After that night, I settled in, feeling at long last that I was where I belonged. Class became less nerve-racking. At work I was able to focus on the baking instead of worrying about what people were saying to me and how I should reply. I was more comfortable hanging out at the cafés with Sylvie’s group, checking out les types, the guys, or reading fashion magazines and listening to Francis Cabrel.
Not that it was effortless, but it was like running, the way you sometimes wear yourself out by pushing too hard. Your muscles burn from lactic acid, your body feels leaden, your lungs ache. And then when you think you can’t go ten more yards, suddenly you hit your stride and the miles unwind beneath your feet and you could run all day.
On Saturday, the clouds part, and the sun spills down benevolently. I’ll never take it for granted again. I catch the number 13 bus downtown, leaving all the windows open to air out the smell of paint, and conveniently forgetting that this weekend is the kickoff of Christmas shopping madness.
The overheated air inside Westlake Mall reeks of stale popcorn and a dozen different designer fragrances the stores are touting. It’s wall-to-wall bodies in Williams-Sonoma and Timberland, Jessica McClintock, Godiva, and there’s a steady drone, like a convention of angry bees. I push past an a cappella group dressed in Dickensian costume. Some fragment of melody or flick of a long skirt stirs memories of holiday parties in the big white house on Woodrow.
Every year we had an open house the first weekend in December, invited all our friends and everyone from JMP, every client, potential client, and former client in David’s files. That made it one big write-off. So we could have the trendiest caterer, a string quartet one year, a zydeco band, or another time, mariachis. Once we had a whole high school choir in the front yard, singing carols as everyone arrived. Okay, that was a bit over the top.
I have to get out of here. Through the glass doors, out into the crisp breeze. Holiday banners float from every light pole and the store windows are outlined in colored lights. A steel-drum band does their pleasantly tinny take on Christmas carols in front of Nordstrom, and the entire population of Seattle seems to be drinking Stewart Brothers coffee and grooving on the rare November sunshine. Bicycle messengers in their Day-Glo orange vests dart and weave through the throngs like bright tropical fish.
I wade into the crowd and out the other side, down to Second Avenue where the music is only a faint twang. Down here the buildings aren’t renovated yet, their beaux arts friezes still black with grime. Whiskery old men in drab sweaters huddle in doorways, smoking, eyeing the hookers in satin shorts and high-heeled boots, goose bumps on their thighs.
In a junk shop where the sign advertises “Articles of Interest for the Collector,” I buy a 1915 ladies’ magazine full of botanical prints, and two ornate frames. Then it’s down to Cost Plus for some red-and-yellow plaid bedspreads to tie over my ugly chairs and drape over curtain rods, a fake Tibetan rug to lay in front of the woodstove.
As I wend my way back up to Third Avenue, I notice the clouds have returned, but they’re thin and pale and aloof, not the full-bellied, low-slung kind that promise more rain.
My house has the ambient temperature of a meat locker, but the paint smell has mostly dissipated. I dump all my packages on the futon and rush around slamming windows, starting a fire, turning on lamps, filling the teakettle. I remove my purchases from the bags, tear off the price tags, lay out the rug. I tie the makeshift slipcovers over the chairs and drape the faux curtains over the blackout shades. When the kettle boils, I make myself a cup of tea and set out some soup for dinner. While I drink my tea, I leaf through my ladies’ magazine, deciding which botanical prints to frame.
I dial CM’s number, but it rings and rings. The machine doesn’t pick up, so I know she has it unplugged. I stare at the phone for a minute, finger on the hang-up gizmo, contemplate calling David. No. Kelley might answer. Or if David answered, he’d probably just be pissed off at me for bothering him.
I dial my mother.
“You’ve reached the Morrisons. None of us is available right now …”
At the beep. “Hi, Mom, it’s me. I just wanted to say hi and see how you—”
“Hi, honey. How are you?” She’s slightly breathless. “I’m okay. How are you?”
“I’m fine.” It sounds like a conversation between two telemarketers. “Where have you been?” “Nowhere. Why?”
“I’ve tried to call you a few times and you never seem to be home.” She laughs. “I’m working very hard, you know.” “At night?”
“Well, I go out occasionally. With friends and …” Her voice keeps trailing off, as if she’s trying to talk to someone else at the same time.
Hesitation. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that.” Her tone changes abruptly. “But how are you? Any news from David? Or your … Miss Goody?”
“It’s Gooden. No news.”
“What did you do for Thanksgiving?” she asks brightly. “I painted.”
“You painted? You mean, like pictures?” “No, Mom. Like walls. I painted my house.”
“Really?” There’s a silence, and then she says, “That’s interesting,” in a way that lets me know she’s not paying the slightest attention to anything I’m saying.
“Mother, do you have company?”
Another silence. “Yes, actually, I do. I have some … people over.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Because I wanted to talk to you, of course.”
“You seem distracted. Why don’t you give me a call when you’re not busy?”
“I’m not busy, Wyn, it’s just—”
She’s still talking when I hang up.
After Thanksgiving, the bakery erupts into frenzied activity. Linda and I are making panettone and Ellen’s mother’s Hanukkah orange bread. Linda’s not thrilled about having her routine disrupted, but I’m glad to be doing something new. Diane’s taking orders for bûches de Noël (yule log cakes).
We all get to make cookies—Diane does gingerbread boys and girls in her inimitable style—one for every occupation and hobby imaginable, ballerina to dogcatcher. Customers fight over the ice skaters and skiers. Ellen has the rest of us working on French and Italian cookies. We make brutti ma buoni (ugly but good), bites of almond paste clogged with candied citrus peel; buttery baci di dama (lady’s kisses); zaletti, raisin-cornmeal cookies; hazelnut biscotti; and sesame-seed wafers. We make dentelles Russes (Russian lace cookies) pungent with dark rum, sandy-golden sablés, carrés aux marrons (chestnut squares) glazed with bittersweet chocolate, and, of course, madeleines.
The display case looks like a cover shot for Bon Appétit, and I love the richness of different tastes and textures. But one morning as I stand admiring the bounty, a memory of my oma’s plain, round cookies decorated with colored sugar dredges up an old happiness that’s more like an ache. The second I’m inside my door, I’m on the phone to my mother. Of course, she’s already left for work.
“Hi, Mom, it’s me,” I tell the machine. “I was just calling to say hi. Again. By the way, do you have Oma’s sugar cookie recipe? I’m going to bed pretty soon, but I’ll be up about three-thirty. Could you call me tonight?”
Her voice is all chirpy when she calls back. Must’ve been a good day. “I found Oma’s recipe,” she says. “Shall I fax it to you at the bakery tomorrow?”
“The bakery doesn’t have a fax machine.”
She’s lost her place in the world for a second. “They don’t have a fax? How can any business compete in today’s—”
“Mom, it’s not a business with a capital B, okay? It’s a small bakery. Very low-tech. I was hoping you could just read it to me.”
“Of course. Got a pen?”
Oma’s Sugar Cookies
1 cup cold butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
¼ teaspoon salt
Grated zest of one lemon
Granulated sugar for rolling cookies
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice or milk
Cut the butter into the sugar until the mixture resembles oatmeal. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Sift together flour, soda, cream of tartar, and salt. Add to butter mixture along with lemon zest and beat with wooden spoon until blended.
Preheat oven to 350°F and lightly butter cookie sheets. Knead dough for 15 to 20 minutes, adding a little more flour if necessary to prevent sticking. Roll dough into walnut-size balls and roll balls in granulated sugar to coat completely. Place on prepared cookie sheets. Using bottom of a glass dipped in granulated sugar, flatten each ball to about a ¼-inch thickness. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until light brown. Using spatula, transfer to cooling rack. Glaze while still hot, if desired, with mixture of confectioners’ sugar and lemon juice or milk. Makes about 5 dozen.
“Thanks.” I shake the cramp out of my hand. “I’d forgotten the kneading part.”
“That’s what gives them that great texture.” Her voice goes all dreamy with nostalgia.
I hesitate. “Thanks for calling me back. I’m sorry about hanging up last time I—”
“No, it’s okay. I was distracted. I’m sorry, too.”
“How’s the job going?”
“It’s a lot more challenging than working at Hubbell.”
“David used to say ‘challenging’ was a euphemism for pain in the ass.”
“Actually, I’m enjoying it. I’m learning so much. How’s the baker’s life?”
“I like it. Except the woman I have to work with is … challenging.” She laughs and then a silence plops down between us like a fat lady in the middle seat on a plane.
“What are your plans for Christmas?” I ask. “I only have one day off, o I can’t go anywhere. I was sort of wondering if you might want to come up here. My place is small, but I think we could—”
“Oh, Wyn, I’d love to, but—I wish you’d asked me sooner. I’m going to Tahoe with some people from the office.”
“That’s okay. I just thought if you weren’t doing anything.”
“I’m sort of committed. We’ve made deposits.”
“It’s okay.” I don’t want to be pissed off, but I am. She’s only been working there since September, and they’re chummy enough to go spend Christmas together? She didn’t even bother to find out what I was doing.
“I could see if I can get a refund.”
“Mother, stop. It’s okay, really.”
“I hate for you to spend Christmas alone.”
“I’m not going to be alone. I’ve had two people from work invite me for dinner, and if CM’s here, I’ll be with her. Listen, I need to go eat something. And I’ve got stuff to do before work. So, I’ll talk to you.”
“Wyn, I’m sorry about Christmas.”
“I’ll come home this spring for a few days.”
It isn’t a total lie. Tyler and Ellen both invited me for Christmas Day dinner. But I envisioned myself making polite conversation with their families and sitting through endless explanations of family rituals and cute little stories about the year Uncle George set Muffy the cat on fire while lighting the candles, and then I declined as graciously as possible.
December 15—my thirty-second birthday. My mother has sent me a check and a card. She calls at 9 A.M., forgetting that I sleep in the morning, so she’s embarrassed and I’m grouchy. CM calls next, from her grant-writing seminar in Phoenix.
Last year—where was I? Oh, yes. My mother’s house. David had to be at a client meeting in Cancun or someplace. But two years ago, on my thirtieth, he took me to Paris for a long weekend. It was our first time away together in over a year, and it was like a second honeymoon. We stayed at the Ritz, sleeping late every morning, waking up to make love and eat perfect croissants dunked in steaming chocolat chaud. Every afternoon we walked the boulevards in the winter darkness. The naked trees scratched at the steely sky and the city glowed like a giant lantern, lit from within. We rode the bateau mouche one night, bundled up against the icy wind, and my birthday dinner was at Taillevent. I felt like a princess. Is it possible that he’s forgotten the date?
I get up and take a Tylenol PM, unplug the phone, and float away into a dream.
First day in a new school. Unsure where to go, I wander down long halls with closed doors on both sides. The other students are all taller than I am, and they smile at each other over my head.
Finally, I come to a classroom with the door standing open. People are going in, so I follow them, but there’s no place left for me to sit. Everyone’s already working on something. Then a girl in the back gets up from her desk and comes over to me, putting her arm around me. It’s my mother. I go limp with relief. I know she’ll show me what to do.
She takes me back to her desk, sits down, goes back to what she’s working on. I just stand there watching her. She looks at me and smiles from time to time, but it’s clear I’m not going to get any direction from her.
At Thriftway that afternoon, I buy all-purpose flour and granulated sugar and a box of food colorings. In the parking lot, couples are picking out trees; women are buying garlands and waterproof bows while their kids run splashing through puddles. Everyone’s bundled up in heavy coats, with bright mufflers and knit caps, and there’s an old guy in a patched sport coat, roasting chestnuts on a little brazier. I buy a small bag, and as the first one crumbles into creamy smoke between my teeth, I know I have to have a tree.
Linda has a black eye. Actually, “black eye” is something of a misnomer. It’s more a hideous purple-green, and the white of the eye has a slick red patch along one side from a broken blood vessel. Her lower lip is twice its normal size.
It’s not the sort of thing you can pretend not to notice, so I say, “What the hell happened to you?”
“My ex-old man, that’s what happened to me,” she says.
“I hope you gave as good as you got.”
“That I did, missy. That I did.” She cracks a tiny smile. “Stupid son of a bitch came over drunk. Howlin’ like a coyote. I had to let him in before somebody called the cops. ‘Course then he tries to get all lovey-dovey, and when I told him to stick it in a knothole, he hauled off and slugged me.” She touches her jaw tentatively. “We mixed it up pretty good before a couple of the neighbors came down and threw him out.”
“Are you going to press charges?”
Her expression is contemptuous. “Big waste of time. Mine, mostly.”
“You could get a restraining order …”
Her laughter is wheezy, and she flinches from the pain. “What am I gonna do? Say, ‘Lookey here, Bubba, this paper says you can’t come around me’? Restraining order, my ass. I could paper my walls with ‘em.”
All at once she remembers who she’s talking to, and she’s especially pissed off because I look sympathetic. “Nothing you’ll ever have to worry about, missy.”
Christmas morning I wake up at five o’clock. I should have kept to my schedule, as Linda’s forever preaching, but I couldn’t face being up all Christmas Eve with nothing to do but remember other Christmas Eves. I turn over. It’s still dark, maybe I can go back to sleep. Too late, I wish I’d made some plans for today. Just going through the motions is hard, but sometimes not going through the motions is worse.
At seven-thirty, I get up, wrap a blanket around me, curl up in the chair. A red and shrunken remnant of last night’s fire glows in the stove. The smell of wood smoke carries memories of Christmases at Lake Tahoe, the cabin we used to rent. My father loved spending Christmas in the mountains. I think it reminded him of his New England childhood, and there was always the tantalizing possibility of snow. I lay in my loft bed every night of the holiday and prayed for a blizzard. I wanted to be stranded in our cabin, with my dad building huge blazes in the fireplace and my mother making hot chocolate with little marshmallows bobbing on top.
Every year, my mother complained about the cold, but she seemed to enjoy it once we were there. She would sit on the couch by the fire and read, absently munching popcorn, while my dad and I went walking in the afternoons. And at night, too, if there was a moon. Each year as I marched behind him, I noted the size of my footprints in his. The air was silent, cold and so crystalline you thought it would shatter and fall to the ground in icy fragments at the slightest noise. We never talked on those hikes. If he wanted to show me something, he would point to it. The only sounds were the puffs of our breath, the crackle of dry pine straw, or the squeak of new powder under our boots, and once, the glorious whoosh of a huge barn owl passing right above our heads.
We always had a little tree that we cut ourselves, and we made decorations from popcorn and cranberries and gingerbread and paper. That was my mother’s turf. She had learned origami from a Japanese friend of her father’s, and she fashioned birds and stars, cats and dogs, trees and angels. She would make tiny holes in both ends of an eggshell, blow the egg out, and then meticulously paint the shell. She could sit and work on those things for hours, like the sailors who carved scrimshaw by lantern light during long nights at sea.
It’s hard to accept that she could traipse off to Tahoe with a bunch of perfect strangers, when it was our place for Christmas with my dad. I wonder if she’s sitting around in front of the fire complaining of the cold like she did with us, or if she’s all bundled up out in the snow, being a good sport so everyone will say, “That Johanna! She’s up for anything, isn’t she?”
Christmas always turned David into an Armani-wearing, Mercedes-driving ten-year-old boy. Every night when he got home from work we had to sit down together and read all the cards that had come in the mail that day. And there were dozens, mostly from business acquaintances who were artists, designers, writers, so each one was a miniature work of art. We displayed them all over the house, along with miles of garland and shimmery silver ribbon. It was the only time of the year he could tolerate clutter.
We had to have a big tree—eight-, nine-, once a ten-footer. It had to be flocked, and it had to be decorated in white and silver balls, clear glass icicles, and tiny white lights. We always had a fire in the fireplace and mulled wine to drink. Those years when southern California spent December basking in eighty-degree temperatures we simply turned the A.C. on full blast and proceeded as usual.
He was an extravagant and imaginative Santa. And after the presents were opened, there was always one more, something special, hidden somewhere in the house. One Christmas Eve when we went upstairs to bed, an exquisite gown of pale yellow silk was draped over my pillow. Another year, a diamond tennis bracelet was casually fastened around my Christmas stocking like an anklet; another time, tickets for a cruise were rolled up inside a toy boat floating in the Jacuzzi.
This morning I can’t help wondering what he’s giving Kelley. What she’s giving him.
Hopefully, something that requires penicillin.
By nine-thirty the grayness that passes for winter morning light is spilling into the darkest corners of the room. I stand up, stretch, decide not to spend the day moping. I feed the fire, put on my stovetop espresso pot, and drag my two unopened presents out of the closet.
I open the one from CM first. It looks like two very large blue baked potatoes. On the end of the box, it says “Down Booties, size 10.” I smile. My ever practical friend remembers that my feet are perpetually freezing. I pull them on, walk around. They have inch-and-a-half-thick foam soles, and they make my feet look approximately the size of rowboats, but within five minutes my toes are warm.
My mother’s present is a hand-knit fisherman’s sweater, made from a rag yarn the color of oatmeal. I wonder which of her Christmas bazaars it came from. Underneath it in the box are two cotton turtlenecks, one purple, one teal, and a check for a hundred dollars.
Well. That was fun. I put the butter into the freezer to make it easier to cut into pieces, set the eggs out to come to room temperature. Collect the flour and the sugar and the food coloring together on the table. I suppose there are worse ways to spend Christmas Day than making cookies.
Out on the porch in my new down booties, I sip at my espresso, hardly feeling the dew that soaks into my sweatpants. Fog obscures the outline of the big house, and hemlock branches poke out of the mist like the arms of sleepwalkers. I’ve consumed about half my coffee when I notice my little Douglas fir tree sitting on the bottom step. In the mad whirl of my holiday social activities, I forgot to take Doug inside. He was probably happier out here, anyway. I pick up the pot and bury my nose in his soft green needles, sparkling with tiny droplets. The clean, aromatic scent is simultaneously piercing and calming. I’d thought I was all cried out, but apparently not.
Walking to work is cold, but so many houses have Christmas trees in the windows and those tiny white lights draped all over their shrubs that it’s like walking through fairyland. Even if you’re lonely, it’s nearly impossible to be sad in the face of this fantasy. And I’m beginning to feel the first rumblings of resentment at David for acting like I don’t exist. Kind of a good feeling.
Linda seems subdued tonight, not so much as a sneer about the cookies I brought her. That’s what Christmas does—brings out the vulnerability, even in people who are mostly immune to the ravages of sentiment. Of course, she doesn’t thank me either.
“What did you do today?” I ask as we’re loading the first batch of bread into the oven.
She shrugs. “Just another day, far as I’m concerned. Got up at four. Had some soup. A little company.” This last part is so quiet I almost miss it.
“Company? Your ex?”
“Huh. Not likely. He probably passed out about noon. My kids.”
#x201C;I didn’t know you had children,” I lie.
“Why would you?” She glowers. “Sometimes I don’t even know I have ‘em. They only show up on holidays. And only if they think there’s somethin’ in it for ‘em.”
“How many do you have?”
“Two.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Boy and a girl.”
I slide the last two loaves off the peel onto the baking tiles of the top deck. “What are their names?”
“What difference does it make to you, missy?”
“I was just curious.”
She looks over the tops of her glasses at me. “Didn’t you ever hear what bein’ curious done to the cat? Kilt him, that’s what.”
“Okay, forget it.” I open the notebook, start setting up ingredients for the cinnamon-raisin and cheddar-cheese breads.
“You been doin’ this for three months now. Haven’t you got those recipes memorized yet?”
“Nope.” I try to keep my voice cheerful.
“Kinda slow on the uptake, aren’t you?”
I snip the string on a bag of white flour and pull the threads till I find the one that unravels the closure. “I forget everything as soon as I walk out that door, and that’s a good thing. Because if I remembered every day that I had to come to work with you, I’d probably never come back.”
She snickers, reveling in her image as the Bad Ass Baker from Hell.
The bakery’s quiet since a lot of people aren’t going to work today. After Linda leaves, I make myself a decaf espresso and take a table in the front. Ellen comes over to sit with me.
“Post-holiday slump,” she mutters, dropping into the chair. She has circles under her dark eyes. “Had twenty people for dinner yesterday. And I’m Jewish, for Pete’s sake. Lloyd’s family. Those cookies of your grandmother’s were great, by the way. I think next year we’ll do those here.” She rolls her head around, rubs the back of her neck. “This is where I carry all my stress. What did you do? Weren’t you going to CM’s?”
“I was, but she ended up going to L.A.”
“So you were alone? I wish you’d called. I could have used the moral support.”
“That’s nice of you, but I wasn’t up to being with a bunch of people.”
She smiles. “Who said anything about being with people? I would have come over to your place and hid from them all.” She pushes up the sleeves of her black knit dress, leaving floury prints. “I should never wear black to work. Look at that.” Her eyes slide over to me. “Did you hear from Shithead?”
“No.” I blot my eyes with a napkin. “Didn’t really expect to, though.”
She puts her arm around my shoulders for a minute. “We never expect, but we always hope. That’s the bitch of it.”